


Good Enough for Government Work

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Series: Cirque de Triomphe [67]
Category: DCU, DCU (Comics), Superman (Comics)
Genre: Clone Rights, Earth-3, Gen, Government, Government Agencies, Government Experimentation, Mirror Universe, Political Expediency, President Luthor, Project Cadmus, Project Jigsaw, Ultraboy - Freeform, a thankless task for the virtuous, and a dangerous opportunity for the wicked, called to carpet, cloning, discussion of Owlman, discussion of slavery, i love waller she's awful, in the context of bioengineering, scientific ethics, the tyranny of desks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-28
Updated: 2019-02-28
Packaged: 2019-11-06 15:14:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17942099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: Over the years of her career in public service, Amanda Waller has made a lot of important decisions.Some of them were wrong. This happens.Are some of them possibly partly responsible for the escape of a terrifying supervillain only weeks after he was sentenced to several consecutive life terms? That might be the case.Are they also what President Luthor might consider horrifying human rights abuses, and additionally takeverypersonally? Well. Yes.





	Good Enough for Government Work

**Author's Note:**

> I just realized this is up on ffdotnet but never got posted over here. It's set a few hours after 'The Owl and the Dead Boy,' which happened a while after midnight in Colorado, so it's roughly dawn in Washington DC.
> 
> Someone suggested I make a Discord server, so that exists now! You can come [here](https://discord.gg/upPqKS9) to chat more conveniently than in the comments (much as I enjoy doing that) about my fic or mirror universes or Batman, as you wish. 😁🤘 Not dead!

The snarl of fury from behind the door of the Oval Office made one of the six Secret Servicemen on guard jump. The others glanced at him in lofty scorn. It was the President's voice, not an intruder; none of them had heard him sound like that in person, but there had been a few televised showdowns with the Kryptonian.

If he'd been alone they'd still have been obligated to check on him, but his cyborg bodyguard was around somewhere, so presidential snarling wasn't an alarm signal on its own. Even on a day like today.

"Sounds like I'm right on time for my appointment," said an immeasurably dry voice, as the head of the NSA approached along the carpeted hall. She was neither tall nor thin, nor was she young, and her hair was buzzed as short as any soldier's, but she wore pearls at her earlobes and throat without any sense of incongruity, and her eyes were the steel of those who feel they have nothing left to prove.

"Doctor Waller," the head of the detail acknowledged, as his subordinates whipped out a trio of scanners to confirm her identity. She absently keyed her passcode in when a keypad was presented, her attention on the door.

"Keep practicing," she told the operative with the genescanner, who was still working thirty seconds after the others were done. Then she opened the office door and went in.

Luthor's eyes landed on her immediately, and he erupted from his chair, hand slammed down on top of a very particular report Amanda recognized immediately even upside-down, with photographs of the shattered outer wall government facility clipped to the front. Debris lay scattered where it had fallen under a mighty blow from within, up to the cliff's edge.

"Why did I not know about this?" he demanded.

Waller raised her eyebrows. "You got that report no later than I did," she said blandly. About fifteen minutes later, actually, and that mostly because he'd been asleep when the Crucible cracked open, while she had been working overnight.

The sound that rose in Luthor's throat was neither laugh nor snarl, but seemed akin to both. "Are you honestly still trying to stonewall me, this late in the game?" He slapped down a photograph on top of the report, one that definitely had _not_ been included in it: a dark-haired teenage boy, unconscious in some kind of upright sealed pod.

With no surprise, Waller noted that she wasn't likely to be offered a chair. Normally Luthor attempted to affect an egalitarian atmosphere almost to the point of absurdity, but now he watched her from behind his desk with the clear intent of calling her to the carpet, as the saying went.

"Ah," she said blandly. "Technically, you weren't cleared for that file."

"Cleared," Luthor scoffed. He didn't add 'I'm the President!', but he did glare at her with probably about that sentiment. "I had the surviving security clips from the breakout, and the initial report referenced Project Codename: Jigsaw. I got to the bottom of it."

Maybe it did say something negative about the flow of information through the national government, that the POTUS had very clearly just been reduced to _hacking_ federal databases to get to the bottom of a crisis, but Waller preferred to think of it as good resource management. He hadn't needed to know. Now that it was relevant, she would have told him, if one of her subordinates hadn't already carelessly left him a trail of breadcrumbs.

As much as was necessary for him to know, at least.

"So," said Luthor, leaning over the desk slightly—not enough to look as though he was trying to loom over her from eight feet away, which would have been ridiculous, but enough to underscore the intent way he was studying her expression, as though he expected her to give anything away. She stood, patient as stone. He drummed his fingers on the report. "Do you have anything to say?"

"I think I'll wait until you've said your piece."

Luthor snorted at the cageyness of it, but let her decision stand. "Alright. Leaving aside the ethics questions—and believe me, we'll get to the ten kinds of illegal and unethical at some point—you thought it was a good idea to keep Owlman and this…Ultraboy in the same secure facility while we got Wayne's long-term cell prepared. _I_ didn't know there was an Ultraboy to worry about. The Supreme Court didn't know, or the International Tribunal. But you knew, and judging by the way he went _down_ instead of _up_ when he got out of his cell, so did Bruce Wayne."

"My people hardly have time to do any real work, they're so busy working out which of their colleagues are moles," Waller reminded her commander dryly. "It should have occurred to me he might know about the project."

Luthor's mouth thinned at the unapologetic way she admitted fault for that single, limited error. "The project," he repeated. "Yes. Let's talk about the project. I was under the impression that after the clone now known as Bob destroyed his facility from within, Professor Hamilton's Project KR was shut down."

"It was. And his notes were seized, and utilized in Project Cadmus."

Air hissed through Luthor's teeth. He was above throttling people for being psychopaths. He _was._ "Soldiers grown from dragon's teeth," he said, with deliberate calm. "It took me a while to place the reference, you know. I wasn't a classics major. Was that your touch?"

"I wasn't a classics major either, Mr. President." It wasn't a no.

"Supersoldiers," Alex said flatly. "Grown in vats. Brainwashed to serve the state. How—tell me, Amanda, _how_ —did this seem like a good idea to you?"

"Well," she said, with a trace of irony, "if the project had been ready for launch at the opening of the Injustice War, America might not have been so easily conquered."

" _Or_ , considering that more than half the takeover was from the inside and Owlman, at least, _knew_ about the clones, they might have provided the conspirators with another big stick to beat the rest of us with." The President shook his head, glanced over the front of the file on his desk again, and looked away with a soft noise of disgust, and back at Waller.

"In the _best_ case scenario, America would have had a squadron of superpowered slaves."

He knew his choice of words was inflammatory. He knew perfectly well he was a white man talking to a black woman. If he were in public, he'd have moderated his language for the sake of politics and what have you. But this was his office, and he was going to call a spade a spade.

And for the first time today, he saw an emotion slightly stronger than longsuffering patience touch Waller's expression.

"And how likely, in all honesty, was a best-case scenario to emerge, in a situation involving sentient weapons?" Luthor threw up his hands and dropped back into the sinfully comfortable swivel chair behind the veritable battleship that had been installed as a presidential work surface while the Resolute Desk was undergoing restoration. It had the Presidential Seal stamped on the front, but it was the official version, in which the eagle's head was turned toward the olive branch held in its talon to the left of the image, rather than the sheaf of arrows on the right.

(Alex had always wondered whether FDR had been sending an intentional message, by placing that variation front and center. _He_ certainly was. The world had had enough of war.)

"Ultraman could have destroyed our entire planet almost any time he took it into his head, while he was free. And you set out to _copy_ him. I think you have officially one-upped the Manhattan Project in terms of _sheer, bloody-minded failure_ to grasp the potential fallout of what you chose to do with science."

There was a second's more silence than there should have been. The head of the NSA stood in the middle of the office with the same rooted patience she generally used as an offensive weapon, but the pause spoke a world more of uncertainty than she had expected to feel today.

"The Manhattan Project was both necessary and inevitable, Mr. President," said Amanda Waller calmly, after that second. "We just put in the effort to get there first."

Luthor blew out a breath that didn't hiss and rubbed the top of his head with the ball of his hand. "Given any new thing, humanity will work out how to ferment it, or kill with it, or both," he grumbled. An admission. "Once the possibility of leveraging the nature of matter for that kind of explosion was understood, someone was going to make it real." He raised his eyebrows. "And you believe that gene-spliced brainwashed supersoldiers are the inevitable result of current advances in genetics."

Waller quirked an eyebrow. _Obviously_. Luthor snorted. "I swear, you spooks get so tangled up in plots and preemptive counter-plots you lose sight of all common sense." He set his teeth and looked her in the eye. "Informed. _Consent._ Doctor Waller. The unborn cannot give it.

"People created in American cloning projects have human rights," he stated, " _irrespective_ of their genetic profiles. The loophole that makes them minors under the legal guardianship of their creators, who are then empowered to give consent to any medical procedures on their behalf, is being closed, and it _never_ actually made child abuse legal. Merely difficult to prosecute."

Luthor leaned back in his chair, hands steepled in front of him. "Any future super-soldier programs _will_ restrict themselves to adult recruits. Any intelligent entities developed through _any_ means will not be trained or deployed for military purposes until they have reached the age of eighteen and chosen to enlist of their own free will."

"So by the time they can legally be mobilized, they'll be obsolete," said Waller flatly. "How practical."

Luthor waved an irate hand. "There will probably be equivalency tests to allow them to emancipate younger than eighteen under certain restricted circumstances, but no, Doctor Waller, it _isn't_ practical. It's _right_. Desperate times may call for desperate measures—heaven knows I've done some very shoddy science to keep ahead of El enough times—but constant desperation is no way to live."

The President was an idealist. Not that that was anything she hadn't known.

"Complacency," she responded, "is no way to survive."

Silence reigned for a few seconds, as Luthor studied her, as though he expected her secrets to all be written on her face. Once again, he was the one who broke it.

"The war is over."

"There will always be another war."

"Probably, someday." Luthor sighed, glanced toward the portrait of Washington, and laced his fingers together. "The Cold War drove a lot of scientific progress, got us the funding and focus that put man on the moon, but I've never believed that was worth the cost, even only the cost measured in damage to America.

"I know you think I have my head in the clouds, Doctor, but I _have_ spent most of my adult life fighting a superpowered alien psychopath, and even more of it running a multinational corporation. I know something about paranoia, and the pressure to keep one step ahead.

"But I believe in us—as a species, and as a nation. We don't _need_ to sell our souls to survive."

It was a good speech, and would have played well on television. Waller merely crooked one eyebrow slightly.

Luthor sighed, lightly, affecting profound lack of surprise, and separated his hands so that he could wave one, as though clearing the air.

"So," he said, attention sharpening, "we come to practicalities. You are very clearly the main organizing force behind this conspiracy, and it is clearly prosecutable as treason."

And the thing about prosecuting a government employee for treason, at the moment, was that there had been so many such trials over the last few months, and were so many yet to come, that no one would take much notice.

Waller steamed, internally, and her posture had stiffened.

"I don't _want_ to do that," Luthor stated. "Even if we weren't in a state of emergency, you'd be one of the most effective members of this administration, and with the world's governments all crippled to some degree, I don't think America can do without you right now, without suffering for it.

"I have worked with far more morally objectionable people in pursuit of a common goal in the past." This was saying very little, since he had even briefly joined forces with the Kryptonian, years ago during the Martian invasion. "So as long as I can count on your cooperation, I want you on our side."

The barely-implicit threat of what he could see done if her cooperation came into question hung in the air, in stark contrast to his glowing golden speech about ethical science and idealistic government. On the other hand, anything less would have been, at this point, outright stupidity.

"Understood," Waller bit out, at last.

Luthor nodded. "I'm putting together an ethical oversight committee. Cadmus and related installations are already being gone over with a fine-toothed comb. A lot of your projects are going to be scrapped, I won't lie to you, but not everything. Adeline Wilson has agreed to come onboard as our new Director of National Intelligence, and she's going to start by heading the investigation. You're suspended from your usual duties, and I recommend that you resign. It will make it much less potentially awkward to engage you in another position.

"But Amanda," Alex leaned forward, expression solemn, one hand on the desktop beside the Crucible break-out report, and Waller had to keep her mouth from twitching dryly as the sunlight streaming in the windows behind him glinted brilliantly off his bald scalp. "If any further human rights abuses— _including_ ones against sapient non-humans—occur on your watch, you _will_ be facing charges. This is your last chance."

Even though he'd just said she was indispensable. "Yes, Mr. President," Waller acknowledged. Trying not to sound too sardonic.

He'd been trying to get Wilson in to interfere with her work since before he'd even been sworn in. It was vaguely galling to have handed him the tools to finally manage it.

"You think that's an empty threat," Luthor remarked. "Don't you."

She said nothing.

"Amanda," he said, almost kindly, "I could send you to prison, if I decided to. Or rather, I could step aside and let the judicial process go to work. It would be a hassle at the moment, but even now we'd survive it, and I'm taking steps to lessen the impact further.

"But right now we have _dozens_ of metahumans and other remarkable individuals who fought for the Society, serving _our_ society. Some of them genuinely want to make up for what they've done, and others are just looking to soften their sentences, but either way…they're helping to rebuild what's been broken. They're _helping._

"Maybe it _is_ a compromise with the devil that we'll pay for down the road, like some people keep insisting. But I know we need everyone, that we can't afford to waste what we have. So I'm giving you another chance to," his lips curved into a slightly ironic smile, "use your powers for good."

Waller gritted her teeth, but not hard enough to be visible. She was nothing like the lowlifes in the Rehabilitative Service Corps. Her loyalty had _never_ wavered. She wanted what was best for this country, and for the citizens as a whole. She would put the well-being of the general population over the rights of a metahuman, or alien, or otherwise-normal costumed lunatic, every time. There was no contest. She would protect the future, no matter what dirty deeds it took in the present.

But that was why he was holding onto her. Keeping her in play, despite this—she admitted it—debacle. Because in a world of treason and subversion and people whose wartime records were ambiguous at best, she could be relied upon not to sell out her country to any power on Earth, or from outer space.

And in spite of the error in judgment that had led to Owlman taking control of Project Jigsaw, she was _good_ at her job.

Luthor clapped, dispelling that topic to make way for another.

" _Well_ , then. Now that we have the national considerations out of the way, I can take a minute for the personal."

"I expected you to start there," Waller remarked, not quite blandly. She had been standing a long time, but she didn't shift her stance, for comfort or in an effort to change the tone of the interview.

"I know you did," said Luthor, with the extremely loud subtext, _that's one reason why I didn't._ She might consider him naïve, but he wasn't an idiot. "And then you thought maybe I hadn't managed to extract that rather remarkable nugget about the Ultraman cloning project." He propped his chin on his hands and looked at her expectantly.

After a few seconds of silence, Luthor said calmly, "Why me?"

"The Kryptonian DNA was unstable," Waller shrugged. "By the time he made the Bizarro, Hamilton was more or less throwing anything he could think of into the mix in the attempt to get a live specimen. The result is healthier than it has any right to be, and the records of how Hamilton managed even that much was lost when it rampaged."

"He," Alex cut in firmly. "Bob happens to be a friend of mine."

Waller pursed her lips for a split second. "He," she affirmed. "So far as our researchers could establish, without viable Kryptonian ova, or at least infant stem cells, it was impossible to ever produce a pure specimen, because the embryo required something—enzymes, organelles, electromagnetic conditions we had not managed to recreate, maybe some alien cognate of mitochondria—that was not present in the cells taken from the adult male.

"Inserting the nuclear DNA into stripped human stem cells allowed development to progress further, but the organisms were never viable. Most of the project time was spent mapping the genome and determining the sequences that were unable to be correctly expressed under laboratory conditions."

The amount of trial and error that must have required, of spontaneously aborted embryos and, later on, occasional survivors with hideous deformities, went unsaid.

"Replacing those sequences with equivalent human genetic coding was suggested a few years ago. The eventual result…well." Her eyes flicked toward the report on the previously inescapable prison known as the Crucible.

This time the silence lingered longer, with Luthor's expectant eyes locked on Waller's face, but she was never going to break first in a waiting game. She stood like a boulder. "I know all of that, Amanda," he said at last, once he'd made it clear that he'd waited fruitlessly for her to say anything more. "Why _me?_ "

She shrugged. "Why not?" Her dark-painted lips quirked to one side. "He _was_ intended for deployment against Kal-El of Krypton. You've been the closest thing Earth has had to a standard anti-Kryptonian contingency plan for years."

Luthor scoffed. "For God's sake, it isn't as if you had the fine control to whip up a baby with his brawn and my brains!"

Waller did smile, at that, as much as she ever did. "Call it superstition."

A great sigh, and Luthor sagged over his desk a little. "Superstition. I read the report on Project: Jigsaw, and specifically Specimen 401b; your researchers patched so much getting a healthy boy he's nearly thirty-nine percent mine. Because of _superstition_ and a hideous lack of scientific ethics, I have a super-powered _son_ who is currently on the run with one of the most dangerous men on earth, learning how to be a murderer."

His hand had closed around the small beam-weapon he kept on his desk disguised as a paperweight, but it didn't read, to Amanda, as a gesture of threat, even if he had known that she knew what it was. More like a child reaching for a favorite toy, for comfort. (The irony was that the weapon's _primary_ setting emitted a beam of Kryptonite-like radiation, and the only person left on earth to whom this would give pause was the boy-clone he was so distraught over.

Luthor _had_ survived this long, as he'd pointed out, so he probably had it set presently to something more useful against humans—'If I shoot you with this repeatedly you'll probably develop some form of cancer in ten years' wasn't, on the whole, nearly as effective a threat as 'this laser can punch a hole through your torso.')

"Are you going to allow sentimentality over Subject 401b to compromise you?" she asked. "Sir," she added a heartbeat later.

Luthor snorted. "Compromise," he said, thoughtfully. Glanced down at the photograph of the boy in his pod, who hours ago had punched his way through seven heavily-reinforced floors and a wall, shrugging off gunfire and taking down everyone who got in his way, except for those few Wayne had tackled himself. For a moment, Luthor wore an expression so complicated Waller was not entirely sure what she was seeing.

And then shook his head. "You know, I wonder what you expect. I'm President, but I'm not a politician. I fought a war, but I'll never be a soldier."

Waller pursed her lips again, almost stayed silent, and then raised her chin a fraction of an inch.

"Can I give some unsolicited advice, Mr. President?"

He flicked the fingers not occupied with the hidden weapon. "Speak."

"You accepted the position of President. That's done. Learn to be a politician, or this town will eat you alive." Or _we_ will eat you alive, she warned, with the tilt of her head and her firmly-planted feet.

In a way, it was a threat. In a way, it was a gesture of respect.

Luthor spun the abstract-looking lump of silicates in his hand, staring thoughtfully at its facets. "You know," he remarked vaguely, "when my company had just recently gotten off the ground, somebody told me that it wasn't enough to be ruthless, that if you wanted to get ahead in business you had to be vicious, and sneaky, and underhanded. 'Get out there and screw them before they can screw you.'"

He looked up at her, and smiled slightly. "I guess it comes down to whether, in a contest of stubbornness, you want to back me, or Washington D.C."

It was not, precisely, a joke. But it wasn't as straightforward a statement as it was meant to sound, either. Because Waller had done her research on the man, and she knew for all his systematic ethics there had been more than a few times that Luthorcorp _would_ have gone under, or at least lost big, without underhanded, scheming, less-than moral tactics. Luthor _knew_ about those incidents, most of them. But he had never been involved. He'd always had vice-presidents on hand to do his dirty work.

His Vice-President _now_ , as a leader of the free world, was hard-working and hard-headed, and able to make fairly hard calls, but he was also even more fundamentally honest than Luthor himself.

The President understood the need for people like her.

"I see," she remarked, nearly drawled, and Luthor snorted, set down his laser-paperweight with deliberation.

"Alright. I expect you have a transition of responsibilities to oversee at NSA headquarters. Please make sure to get David your formal resignation by the close of business tomorrow. You'll have a position again, after all of this, provided no more serious skeletons come out of the closet. In the meantime, I'm putting you in charge of the manhunt for Owlman. You'll get a small detachment of agents and some requisitional authority. _Don't_ do anything I'll have to reprimand you for. And treat the boy Jigsaw with _humanity_. Are we clear?"

Amanda thought about it. This was punishment duty, and also a show of trust, and also a test. In her opinion, she deserved all three. And she had every confidence in her ability to pass.

"Perfectly."

Her first order of business would be what it had been before she entered the Oval Office: find out how Owlman had escaped his cell.

And make sure it never happened again.

**Author's Note:**

> Alex is not using the Resolute Desk (a Presidential relic made out of a symbolic ship by the British as a gift and modified by FDR to hide his wheelchair, becoming iconic in the process) because Ultraman damaged it in the course of murdering President Obama. I'm sad about having had to murder Obama but the alternative was he wasn't President at all.
> 
> Director of National Intelligence is a real position though not a very powerful one; it was created after 9/11. It may have started stronger here; it certainly is at this point in the plot. Amanda Waller is canonically a Doctor of Political Science, btw. And 'David' is Black Manta, at some point he'll have an actual scene stg.
> 
> ...I have a lot more emotions about this fic than I did in 2015.


End file.
